I bought a sunburst Stagg electric upright bass for the unbelievable price of 9 at a local music store, Stagg was running a promotion. I made a few modifications including putting on new strings (Thomastik Spirocore Light) – the ones that come on the bass are quite heavy and stiff. I also filed the slots in the nut to lower the strings so you can just slip a credit card between the strings and the fingerboard. (Go to Harbor Freight and buy a cheap set of jeweler’s files – the round one is just right. I also removed the strap button that is at the heel of the fingerboard, which was getting in the way for notes above D on the G-string. The bass now plays like a dream and it sounds great in the big-band. (All the guys said how great it sounded.) No fingerboard buzzing, lots of bass, nice growl.

The fingerboard is a synthetic material that has a very nice feel, dry, not at all sticky and fast, not unlike a sating finished wood neck. The fingerboard on my bass is flat and straight and has no buzzes even with the strings very low to make it easy to play.

The preamp feature with MP3 player input and headphones output is really great, I put a bunch of Aebersold play along tracks on my ipod and can play along quietly for hours. The preamp is a little bit noisy (hiss) but you do not notice it at all after the music starts.

The tuners are heavy duty and stay in tune, the adjustable peg is very sturdy, the fit and finish is nice and the case is good. This really is a great deal – even at 9. I could not be happier with this purchase.

After 36 months and about 200 gigs, these are my comments. First, the good. The color and finish get a lot of compliments. The electronics are well designed for the most part. The controls can give you a nice thump or great sustain. The solid construction means temperature and humidity extremes don’t affect the instrument much, if at all, a considerable load off my mind where I live. Now the bad. The adjustable tail piece digs into the protective tape, which covers the internal battery and signal wires. I’m talking about inside the bass body itself. After a few times of raising and lowering the tail piece, the aluminum sticky-back RF shield tape got caught on the tail piece shaft inside the instrument and pulled the signal wire out of the circuit board, bringing my future with that instrument to a halt. Replaced the tape, inserted the signal wire back into the circuit board, and I had confidence in the instrument again. The original strings couldn’t hold a note. They had only a single wire rope in the center and cut my fingers despite being flat wound. A set of nylon-wrapped flat wounds and 0 later and I have strings I can trust. The A-string tuner arrived broken. The tuners appear to be made of inferior metal and have a hard-to-turn tuning ratio. Rather than have the rest of the band tune to my A-string, I replaced all the tuners with some Grover classic bass tuners. It’s almost a perfect fit. The mounting screw holes were exact copies of the Grovers. The tuner machine head post holes are exactly across from each other. There’s not much room for the posts, and replacements may be too long and interfere with each other. The original tuner posts are very short. A better configuration would have been to stagger the post holes.

The belly brace is useless. Can’t imagine using it for a real gig. The supplied belly brace was too long. It was too far to reach the neck and I had to compensate by either bending my wrist at a sharper angle or turning the instrument away. Maybe my arms are too short. (Doubt it.) The fret markers aren’t the most accurately placed on the side of the fingerboard. The fingerboard has some minor dips and rises in it, making exact fingering interesting. There’s a single strap button on top. Still looking for Stagg strap suppliers. The tail piece allows the bass to not only move, but also twist. Very annoying during high energy pizzicato or plucking. The nine-volt battery is easy to replace, which is good considering I’ve had to replace it eight times in the last 18 months. A fellow musician who plays a guitar says he changes his battery once a year. In summary, the bass appears to be well engineered, but the construction leaves a lot to be desired. The gig bag has good proportions, but two of the three zippers were broken off. If you don’t mind changing your own strings, searching for replacements and changing the tuner mechanisms, replacing the shielding on the signal wires, possibly removing the circuit board to reinsert a pulled signal plug, and replacing the zipper pulls, this is a good first electric upright bass for relatively little money.

The bass doesn’t come with a stand. I bought the Ingles Adjustable Cello and Bass Stand When you adjust this stand to the bass, it narrows the footprint and makes it easier for wind to blow the bass over. However, the fingerboard latch is easy to use and doesn’t bother the strings or scratch the neck. Weights on the feet would help stabilize it.

Ever since Bass Player Magazine did an article on this bass in 2008, I’ve been very curious about it. I’ve been with my current group for 10 years and decided I was going to take the fretless plunge (I’ve never so much as held one before). The review in the magazine had a pretty favorable opinion and when I saw that they were 0, I decided to go for it. Right out of the box, the violin brown exceeded my expectations. (Even my wife said, “Wow, that’s pretty.”) The finish didn’t have a single blemish on it. The joints were all very tight and clean. The neck does need a little truss adjustment due to high string height. And there are two spots on the fingerboard where I’m getting some buzzing but my luthier should be able to fix that. The first thing I did was plug my MP3 player and headphones into it. This is going be a VERY often-used feature. My rig stays at the practice space so this feature is crucial. Do remember, this is NOT an acoustic bass. It’s barely audible when not plugged in. What it DOES mimic though is a traditional upright. It stands about 6 feet tall with the peg extended and has a “woody” quality to the tone that is very similar to a double bass. Again, this does not sound EXACTLY like a big double bass. This sounds like what it is, an Electric Upright Bass. Glissandos (slides) are really cool and I’m having a blast learning a whole new side to playing bass. The preamp is loud and very clear and will be quite enough to cut through the mix in a pretty loud Rock/Blues group. Going to have to get a stand for it, though. It comes with two body pieces, (the upper one is useless, from what I could tell). I’m even going to get a bass bow and mess around with that. Overall, I’ve never played an NS E.U.B. to compare the two, but considering the 1-2 thousand dollar price difference, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that the difference was worth it. I love this bass a lot. The Zon is going to have make a little room now onstage.

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